General Atomics Delivers FQ-42 Vengeance Uncrewed Fighter to Creech Air Force Base

General Atomics delivered one FQ-42 Vengeance uncrewed fighter to Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, on September 18, 2026. Defense News reported the delivery on September 21; defence-industry.eu also reported it and gave the September 18 date. The aircraft is General Atomics' entrant in Increment 1 of the US Air Force's Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program.

General Atomics says it is "on track to deliver six aircraft per month." The figure is the company's statement of its own delivery capacity, not an Air Force order, a contract quantity or a rate already achieved. The reports describe the delivery of a single aircraft to Creech.

According to the same reporting, the FQ-42 has flown in formation with F-35 Lightning II fighters and with the F-15E Strike Eagle, in preparation for collaborative control operations with crewed aircraft. No date is given for those flights. A General Atomics vice president of advanced programs said: "Every week, the Air Force is pushing forward with new and more impressive accomplishments using Vengeance."

The delivery follows a statement of intent from the service. Speaking at the Air & Space Forces Association's 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference, the Secretary of the Air Force said the service expects to have at least 500 autonomous aircraft in service by 2032, a plan DefenseScoop reported on September 14. That expectation covers autonomous aircraft as a whole rather than the FQ-42 specifically, and it is a projection of the fleet the service intends to field, not an order book. In mid-September the Secretary of the Air Force also announced the official popular names of the two Increment 1 aircraft: Vengeance for the General Atomics design and Fury for its counterpart from Anduril.

That counterpart, the FQ-44 Fury, is the other Increment 1 aircraft. GlobalMilitary.net's database records the FQ-42's first flight on August 27, 2025, and the FQ-44's on October 31, 2025. Neither type has an in-service year recorded, and the Creech delivery does not change that: the sources describe no entry into squadron service and no declared capability for either aircraft. The database also carries a page for the YFQ-48 Talon Blue from Northrop Grumman, for which no first-flight date is recorded.

The CCA aircraft are intended to augment crewed fighters for air-to-air missions through crewed-uncrewed teaming. The types they are meant to accompany include the F-22 Raptor and the F-35, as well as the planned F-47. An Experimental Operations Unit headquartered at Nellis Air Force Base, also in Nevada, works with General Atomics and Anduril to bring the aircraft into exercises and simulate future operations. For General Atomics, the Vengeance extends a line of uncrewed aircraft that includes the MQ-9 Reaper and the MQ-20 Avenger.

The next public markers are further deliveries measured against the six-a-month rate General Atomics has described, the Experimental Operations Unit's exercise work with both Increment 1 types, and any Air Force statement recording either aircraft as in service.